Aret Gıcır’s second solo exhibition, Between Fire and Sword, will run from April 10 to May 9 at the Öktem & Aykut contemporary art gallery in Istanbul. 

Its title inspired by the writer Zabel Yesayan’s depiction of the 1909 Cilicia massacres, Between Fire and Sword explores the irreversible rupture that took place in Anatolia one century ago. The artist attempts to approach the Catastrophe through the stories of Armenian women who struggled to protect their children, families, churches, schools and land by taking up arms and who resisted in order to stay alive in the period leading to 1915.

In his paintings, Gıcır abstracts once again the already isolated geography and people by displacing them onto different, estranged spaces. He also challenges the perpetual reproduction - through politics, art, literature and cinema - of images of Anatolia that have depicted it as a lonely, romantic, forlorn or static landscape since the late years of the Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Republic. Against recent revived attempts at re-signification, Gıcır’s paintings suggest that such imaginaries of Anatolia did not correspond to reality in the first place.

The women whose stories and names are barely known except for the few photographs they have left behind and who are caught Between Fire and Sword (in Armenian, Unt Hur yev Unt Sur), now stand suspended before us between, on the one hand, bearing witness, and on the other hand, the impossibility of witnessing. The paintings ultimately question whether it is indeed ever possible to depict the Catastrophe within the limits of the artist’s grasp, since, in the words of the novelist Hagop Oshagan, “The Catastrophe, immensurable yet at the same time peculiarly uniform, will always elude the artist who tries to penetrate it.”

The show will open at 6:30pm on April 9 at the Öktem & Aykut gallery which is located at Büyük Hendek Caddesi, Portakal Sokak No:2 34420, Galata, Istanbul.

Born in Istanbul in 1978, Aret Gıcır graduated from the Department of Painting of Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. His first one-person exhibition entitled “Yerevan” was held in Tokatlıyan Han in 2009. He was awarded an artist residence in New York for his project, The Affliction of the Patriarch by the Moon and Stars Project-SVA in 2013. Gıcır lives and works in Istanbul.